Alright. The emails went out.
I got waitlist.
I have been sitting on my hands for five years so I would not end up with a Quest on the shelf and a Bigscreen in a drawer and some half-dead Index face gasket I refuse to throw away. I wanted the Valve headset. The wireless eye tracking PCVR one. The “this is for the Steam library you already own” one. I walked past every Black Friday Quest bundle like I was better than that. Today Valve rolled a die and told me to keep walking.
That is the mood.
What actually went down
Signups closed at 10 AM Pacific. Valve shuffled the whole list once. Same trick they used for Steam Machine. Signing up Monday did nothing. Signing up at 9:59 AM Thursday did nothing. We all got the same raffle ticket and some of those tickets were real.
Two emails.
Reservation queue means they parked a unit with your name on it. Still not a buy button. Purchase mails start tomorrow, September 18. You get 72 hours to pay or they tap the next person.
Waitlist means your number landed past the pile they currently have set aside. That is Valve’s sentence, not mine. They say they will email you if you get pulled into the queue. No place in line. No date. The store page already swapped the button to “join the waitlist,” which is a cute way of saying the party started without you.
Half my timeline is a reservation screenshot. The other half is the waitlist screenshot and a little funeral emoji.
And of course the reservation people already own hardware. Index. Quest 3. Beyond. Some extra headset they bought “just to try pancake lenses.” Five HMD’s in a closet and they still won the Frame. Meanwhile I spent half a decade doing this noble little bit where I refused to buy anything else because I wanted one good PCVR HMD from Valve. The lottery does not give a damn about your personal lore. It does not know you closed the Bigscreen page twelve times. It does not know you talked yourself out of a Quest because you did not want another data stealing storefront living in your face.
Someone signed up as a joke, no plan to buy, and landed in the queue. That is the system working as designed. It is also why I want to lie down on the carpet.
People are already canceling the Arcturus color camera because that camera is a Frame add-on and the Frame is now a maybe. Fair. I would not mail a company $money for a lens that clips onto a headset I do not have. I also would not blame anyone who is making the “waitlist onset depression” jokes. I laughed at one and then I felt worse, which is the correct sequence.
Reservation folks start getting purchase emails tomorrow. Seventy-two hours. Pay or bounce. Waitlist folks sit here until Valve sends the “hey, you got moved” mail. Or they sit here longer than that. I do not know which. Neither do you. Neither does the guy with five headsets who is already measuring a new shelf.
Yeah, I am salty
I wanted this thing because I play PCVR. Not because I collect plastic. I waited. I skipped the easy purchases. I told myself Valve would eventually make the wireless HMD for the library I already paid for. Today a random number put me behind people who could open a headset shop out of their spare bedroom.
Anyway. I am going to go stare at my Index like it personally betrayed me. It did not. Valve’s dice did. Same difference tonight.
